The rewrite of Gabber for Gnome 2 is coming along pretty well. For further information on the next generation of Gabber, you should go to http://gabber.jabberstudio.org/. All future development of Gabber will be taking place from there. <julian>

23 May 2003: Gabber 0.8.8 Released

A new version of Gabber has been released. This version features a lot of small updates over the past year, including a status icon using the freedesktop.org protocol for GNOME2/KDE3, nickname highlighting in group chats, a Read Previous button in normal messages, an updated XML parser, and a bunch of bug fixes. There are several other changes as well, be sure to see the NEWS or ChangeLog for more details.

Update: Those of you looking to test extremely alpha software may wish to take note of Gabber 2: 1.9.0 preview release. It is very alpha software at this point, and there are no binaries. <julian>

16 January 2003: Gabber Privacy Violation in Bugtraq

As some of you may already know, information about a privacy violation in Gabber has been posted to Bugtraq. The update notification feature of Gabber (and other Jabber clients) used to work by notifying update.jabber.org that you have logged in with Gabber version x.x.x. This feature has not been configurable in Gabber. The code for the update notification has been removed from Gabber CVS, and will therefore be removed from 0.8.8 should I ever release it. update.jabber.org has not been functioning for a while, so there won't really be any change in end user experience.

Download current versions of Gabber at your own risk. I'm warning you that me and all the other Jabber people may be incredibly evil and selling your presence information to the RIAA so they can eat your brains when you wake up... or something like that. Really, update.jabber.org did not collect presence information and it doesn't even work anymore. If Gabber contacting update.jabber.org bothers you, then just stop using Gabber. There's Gaim and Psi and a bunch of other clients anyway. Or you could get your Jabber server administrator to edit /etc/hosts and point update.jabber.org to 127.0.0.1. Or you could grab Gabber CVS and use that. If you have problems, feel free to contact me. <julian>

23 September 2002: Interviews, Reviews, and More, Oh My

I was recently interviewed by Jabber.org. I will also be interviewed on live Internet radio by OJ Barbicane on WOPN tonight. Along with both of these, I have published a short little review of Apple's iChat for Gabber developers. Gabber 0.8.8 will be released shortly, and after that you can expect updates on Gabber2. <julian>

9 June 2002: Graduation and Birthday

Congratulations to all those of the Class of 2002 who graduated as I did, and a little Happy Birthday to me as well ;). <julian>

1 March 2002: Gabber README Update: Dialog positioning

Thanks to temas, I now know why Gabber's dialogs are sometimes oddly positioned. The README has been updated with more information:

The GNOME default settings for dialog handling are somewhat odd.
"Place dialogs over application window when possible" should be
disabled in the Look and Feel -> Dialogs section of Gnome Control
Center (gnomecc). It defaults to enabled. Dialog position should
also be set to "Let window manager decide" and Dialog hints should
be "Dialogs are treated specially by window manager." This assumes
you are using a modern window manager which mostly conforms to
the window manager specifications.

This should fix the problems some people were seeing, such as dialogs appearing partially offscreen.

Update: Sorry, I originally I had inverted "disabled" and "enabled" in the above statement. GNOME should not be trying to place your dialogs for you. So disable "Place dialogs over application window when possible." Sorry for the confusion. <julian>

New version of xtext fixes hidden line problem (julian, Andreas Fuchs)

Nickname highlighting in group chats (julian)

Experimental festival support (Mike Szczerban)

No more autoupdate (julian)

Status Icon for GNOME2/KDE3 using the freedesktop.org protocol (julian)

What is Gabber?

Gabber is a Free and Open Source GNOME client for an instant messaging system called Jabber. Jabber is a Free and Open Source distributed instant messaging system. It does not rely on a single server, and the protocol is well documented. Jabber allows communication with many different instant messaging systems, including ICQ and AIM. There are several different Jabber clients already, but no other GNOME clients as of this writing. Hopefully Gabber will serve the purpose of being a robust GNOME Jabber client well.